Tony-winning actress uses theater to raise awareness about U.S. care economy

At the intersection of art and social impact, Sarah Jones’ current work-in-progress, “The Cost of Not Caring” is witty and intriguing, and brings to the stage a conversation that spotlights how we all pay the cost in dollars and human suffering when care is not prioritized. 

Jones, host of the podcast America, Who Hurt You? and a Tony-winning visionary and solo performer, brought a 45-minute version of the performance to Detroit for a sneak peek and discussion about the importance of shifting the care infrastructure with emphasis on making care count in the November presidential election. The tour, a partnership with Caring Across Generations, also stopped in Chicago and Atlanta.

“I hope this science fiction you’re about to see up here helps you remember the assignment this November,” she quips to an engaged audience of over 200 at Saint Andrew’s Hall. “Our country is depriving us of care that other countries have access to. We need to vote and make sure we tell everyone that these are issues that are most important all the way down the ballot. We’re not asking for handouts; this is our tax dollars getting spent on care for our people.” 

Nodding heads and clapping hands implied that Jones’ statements resonated with the audience. 

Set far in the future, where government policies involving care incorporate an AI-regulated economy run by a businessman who honors profit over people, “The Cost of Not Caring” features a medley of voices spanning generations, class, culture, gender and abilities who are at a rally for the Department of Care speaking about their frustrations, experiences, and joys of providing and receiving care.  

Weaving in and out characters through voice and accents, personalities and perspectives, style and mannerisms, Jones seamlessly gets the audience invested in a topic that affects us all in some way, and at some point in our lives. 

Sitting center stage on a stool under spotlight, Jones transitions into six individuals inspired by members of her real-life multiracial family; the microphone stand is dressed with garments and accessories to distinguish between each of them. She slips into Lorraine, a 200-year-old woman wearing clear-framed glasses whom she took care of; a self-described privileged white woman in her 120s, who says because she had access to resources, society assumed she didn’t care about inequalities within the care system but she’s committed to addressing the issue; an 140-year-old economist; an immigrant who spoke about the dehumanization of care workers; Deloris, a professional caregiver who couldn’t afford her own care when needed; and Rashid, a former rapper who briefly came out of retirement to share a freestyle about democracy— noting that “care” is in the term. At the root of the rally was the message that human connection is the triumphant component. Care is the answer. 

Following are edited excerpts of a conversation with Jones and Ai-jen Poo, next-generation labor leader and executive director of Caring Across Generations, regarding the personal and societal costs of not providing adequate care – including the trauma and loss that can result, the legacy of women of color as the backbone of the care economy, and the urgency of addressing the care crisis. 

LaToya Cross: Sarah, with this show, you’re crafting each voice distinctively, and they all come with their personal relationship to care. Can you speak to the diversity of thought presented by each character and bringing audiences, in this way, into this conversation about the care economy? 

Sarah Jones: Thank you. I love playing diverse characters because all of them — even if they have resources — we all still lose in this version of events because we don’t have the care we need. So, I get to open people’s eyes who think they’re just coming to the theater and instead they’re getting a whole new identity. I bring voice to an audience not used to the phrase care economy, but they’re in it and it could help them see themselves in care as a caregiver, care receiver or both. This performance shows that no matter what your gender, your race, your age, or your ability, the one thing that connects us all and is at the core of whether we function or not is care. Yet, we don’t even know it or talk about it. It’s really wild. I like that some people are more aware of the fact that they need it, but again, I love the reminder that it shouldn’t be this hard. We just think that this is kind of a baked-in part of the grind. There should be no grind anywhere near care. So, this is a unique moment Ai-jen has been building with others for decades and now everything’s rising to make a shift.  

Ai-jen Poo: We’re in a moment of a lot of momentum, but we still have so much work to do. We still have to help people connect the dots between their own experiences of really struggling to afford that child care or having to figure out how they can get their parent(s) into the right assisted living program. All of the things people are struggling with, and they’re just experiencing this as life, right? 

Cross: Yes, that part. Can we hold space and speak to the historical significance of women, women of color leading this charge in change and this movement toward an adequate care system?

Poo: I think about Dorothy Lee Bolden, who founded the National Domestic Workers Union out of Atlanta in the 1970s. She was Dr. King’s neighbor, and she knocked on his door and said, the domestic workers want to be a part of the civil rights movement. He said ‘organize,’  and she did. She built this union, and the only two things required to be a part of the union were you had to be registered to vote and you had to be a domestic worker. She knew the foremothers of our movement and how important it was to have your voice heard through voting and organizing. And so we have this incredible legacy of women, women of color, and women of all races who have advocated and fought and built this language that we now use, care and the care economy. These paths have been blazed by different people and it’s all coming together now. 

Jones: I think it’s poetic. Women of color are the majority of those who do this work, professionally; that is very connected in the historical aspects of this moment. I feel like this is an incredible opportunity as an artist to bring my personal healing journey. Talking about care is talking about healing, love, everything we need right now. 

Part of this conversation that rarely gets discussed is the work it takes to provide care. What are those skills; what should be considered in this area of domestic work? 

Poo: You have workers who get up every day and their profession is to uphold the dignity of another human being, like a home care worker and the skill and capacity and patience and compassion, empathy, but also the skills of how do you keep somebody who is bedridden from getting bedsores. So there’s a whole series of practices and things that you try and not everything works depending on your size, your shape and caregivers just have to develop those skills – technique and expertise that is always underestimated. I mean, we still call domestic workers help, thank you for helping.  

Jones: In other professions you have language, you have a whole infrastructure that exists and you can name every aspect of what’s happening. It’s very technical. To bring it back around, something you mentioned about it being women of color, the first people who did this work in this country were Black women who were literally unpaid to do this. And yet brought all those skills, made community happen, gave early education, gave the foundation of who people became, literally nursed. People literally were doulas and when we look at how our society is structured we don’t have any scaffolding in place for this. It’s just been organically self-generated. So, it’s not a surprise that here we are a century and a half later and still this highly skilled work that requires a lot of sophistication is instead relegated to it not even being a job. You’re just the ‘help’ when actually you’re an architect. What we’re trying to do is also help people see the racism, misogyny and how this is still rooted in the Jim Crow South. We get to move with lightning speed toward this new moment where we acknowledge that history and make some repairs. 

‘The Cost of Not Caring’ addresses the joys and frustrations of caregivers. Let’s get into the joy aspect and the passion that comes across. 

Poo: It’s a profession for more than 2 million people and what we’ve found in all the shows and conversations is that there’s so much pride that people take in caring for their loved ones. It’s like this is one of the most important roles we have in life as a caregiver and the most important relationships are relationships of care. What’s dissonant is the fact that it is so valuable to us, but then as a society, we haven’t found ways of really recognizing it and respecting it for what it’s worth. There’s a gap between the amount of pride and dignity that we rest in this relationship of care and the way that our society treats it. And what we’re trying to do as a movement is bridge that gap.

There’s an element of this conversation and what’s presented in ‘The Cost of Not Caring’ that also addresses the criticality and risks of a poor care infrastructure. In your experience, what happens when society doesn’t prioritize care? 

Jones: You just made me emotional. I have family members who have passed away needlessly. I have folks with drug addiction issues, childhood trauma issues, all of which would’ve been addressed with care if people had been home with their kids, instead of working 18-hour days. I look back in my life and I really see how much this is about grieving the lack of care, and I’m motivated by that because my personal care story no is riddled with the lack thereof and how we create more trauma in society when we don’t make sure care is central and prioritized. 

Poo: There’s two kinds of suffering: the kind that is an inevitable part of the human experience–we’re all going to experience grief and loss and hardship of different kinds, but there’s a whole realm of suffering in the care economy that is the result of policy choices and our failure as a country to really build the programs that people need. It isn’t natural that people have to go into debt to pay for childcare. It’s not natural that women are going to work two weeks after giving birth. It’s actually profoundly unnatural. And it’s the result of policy choices. And so part of this project is about meeting people where they are and having some fun, some humor and some stories, connecting and seeing ourselves and lives through a different lens, then realizing, yeah, we can make a different choice here; it doesn’t have to be this way.

Jones: This is personal, it’s political, it’s at an individual level and it’s at the highest level of the community. The flip side of the trauma, the violence, the things we see in our society is care.

This is the most important thing we can do to give ourselves the democracy we want to be.